Recent findings have brought to light a troubling statistic: between 2019 and 2021, a staggering 51.9% of female students in Ghanaian Senior High Schools endured instances of sexual assault.
This revelation stems from a report jointly produced by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Girls Excellent Movement (GEM), titled “Sheltered yet Exposed.”
According to the report, a majority of the assaulted girls, specifically 54.3%, were between the ages of 17 and 22, while the remaining 45.7% fell within the 11 to 16 age range.
The perpetrators of these assaults included friends, family friends, schoolmates, teachers, and strangers.
The breakdown of the perpetrators revealed that friends accounted for 24%, family friends 12%, schoolmates 12%, teachers 10%, and strangers 9%.
Juliana Ama Kplorfia, the Founder and Executive Director of GEM, expressed her concern during an event organized by the Center for Social Justice (CSJ) with support from the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Ghana.
She cited uncles, cousins, neighbors, fathers, and fathers-in-law as additional groups responsible for sexually assaulting SHS girls.
Kplorfia attributed these distressing incidents to a range of challenges, including academic, financial, and mental stressors, which left some victims grappling with depression, trauma, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and panic attacks. Tragically, some of these girls ended up dropping out of school.
Kplorfia called upon the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service to allocate resources to counseling units within schools, emphasizing the importance of effective support systems to protect vulnerable girls from predators.
She also stressed the need to make reporting rape and sexual harassment incidents free of charge and eliminate taxes on sanitary pads, making them freely available to female students.
Furthermore, she urged parents to maintain vigilant oversight of their children to prevent them from becoming targets of sexual predators.